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About Theatrical Smoke

Theatrical Smoke is a blog dedicated to ideas about learning and working with people in general, but in specific, it’s often about working with people who support teaching, learning, and scholarship under the umbrellas of Libraries and IT departments. D. Grainger Wedaman espouses his own individual views induced from his own interaction with the phenomena of life; things here are not representative of any group or organization. Guest contributors are welcome. As are suggested topics.

About D. Grainger Wedaman

D. Grainger Wedaman is Director of Research and Instruction Services, Brandeis University, is Chair of the Board of Trustees of NERCOMP (the NorthEast Regional Computing Program: http://www.nercomp.org) and sits on the advisory boards of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (http://www.educause.edu/eli) and the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE: http://www.nitle.org/).

His background is in Comparative Literature and in Library and Information Technology services in Higher Education, and his interests are in developing learning communities, on campuses, and between campuses, to address the challenges of teaching, learning, and scholarship in an age of change.

Recently, he helped organize the BNN Symposia Series (http://bnn-symposium.org/), a collaboration between NERCOMP, the Boston Library Consortium, and NITLE (the National Institute for Teaching in Liberal Education) to present forward-looking speakers on teaching, learning, and scholarship in the digital age. And he helped create the MBMH Seminar Series (now called ISIS Seminars) as a forum for library and IT staff in participating schools to collaborate inter-institutionally in addressing shared challenges. He helps organize the yearly Academic 15 research project, which captures the perspectives of academic staff on curricular change and related organizational challenges. He’s also working on new forms of professional development, like the forthcoming NERCOMP Learning Academy, which aims to improve learning in the workplace by scaffolding individual projects of inquiry.

He’s published ECAR research bulletins on supporting academic software and academic libraries in the digital age, and recent talks and workshops he’s given have been on Library/IT Collaboration, liasionship and collaboration, the Future of the Library, learning and innovation in Library/IT organizations, Immunity to Change, and learning organization research. Recent research has been on academic staff perspectives of curricular change, assessment, and on particular applications of innovations in pedagogy.

He’s also a facilitator and a coach-in-training of the Immunity to Change mindset-re-authoring process.